Yes, you're missing something. I run a small iOS contracting shop that does continuous integration. When the contracting market is good, we never have enough build servers, which can only be Macs. Virtualization only gets us so far.

There IS NO aws / EC2 service for macs. I can't just spin up some instances to handle the load and spin down after the engineers go home. The options are literally run to the Apple store and blow a few grand on a couple of boxes, which are hopefully in stock, which we then upkeep indefinitely in a physical closet. To handle a big spike, we really need like 10, but that's a big cash outlay for machines that will be idle in 6 weeks.

I am a developer, and hunting and installing Mac Minis, dealing with RMAs and AppleCare, etc., is not being productive for me. We're small enough that getting a network guy to handle that (assuming you can even find Apple network guys) is not economical. This looks like an easy solution.

BTW, maybe you'll be interested – I develop hosted continuos integration service specifically for iOS / Mac developers, see it here http://hosted-ci.com/

Understood, and a service that did this for a _lot_ of different platforms (hardware and software) would be considerably more compelling.

The absence of a "heterogenous" cloud (I know, this is a contradiction in terms) is part of why our business has to drag a server room around...

> Am I missing something?

I think you are. I work fulltime at a bank for my paycheck. I have an internet connection in my apartment, and an office assigned wintel laptop. When I get home at 6ish, I can maybe put it 2-3 hours of coding. Right now I code 8 hours of Scala for my dayjob. Have always been wanting to check out what objective-C is all about. Perhaps I could learn how to write an app. Don't have an iphone ipad imac etc. So paying $40 a month to check this out is not such a bad idea. I'll sign up, see if I can hack objective-C on the iOS, and take it from there.

So let's assume you wills spend couple of months learning iOS, and will decide that you're into it. Will you buy yourself a Mac at that point?

Assuming yes, you've maybe generated them $100 in revenue. They would need 10,000 people like you to generate their first million in revenue, and they have obviously many costs.

Do you think the world has at least 10,000 people interested in iOS development who don't have a mac yet? 100,000?

You are trying to count your chickens before they hatch.Before Netflix came along, the thinking was - if you like a movie you will just buy the DVD so you can watch it any number of times. Its just $10, why not just buy it ? Guess what, I watch tons of movies, don't buy a single DVD. If I like the movie I put it on my netflix queue & then watch it right there. If its not available, no skin off my back - there's plenty of other movies that are available on my queue, some 300+ are unwatched, last I checked. My wife averages 3 books a month. We don't own a single "book". She's on her 2nd kindle and all our books are essentially on the AWS. When she moves to her 3rd kindle & so on...the books will continue to be on the cloud. She downloads one book, reads it & then deletes it & downloads the next. So yes, owning a Mac, or even a PC is not on my to-do list. The bank gives me a laptop, why should I go buy my own PC ? And for what ? 8 hours of Scala per day at my desk is quite enough. I don't bring my work home. Objective-C will start out as a hobby. I don't know if I'm going to be able to complete my app, put it on the app-store, get customers etc. Seems like a daunting task. So no, I won't buy a Mac. And yes, the world has plenty of people who work for big-corp and pull in 150k coding business apps, with no desire to own Macs & PC, while still doing some hobby coding in some fringe language on the side just to retain their sanity. Office work gets boring after a while, and I plan to write silly time-waster apps in objective C, not your standard issue portfolio optimization code which I do at work anyways.

Wait. You are a professional programmer at a bank and you don't own a PC or mac at home? Is this common? How do you keep your skills up to speed?

> Is this common?

Well, its not uncommon. From my unscientific survey among my colleagues I'd say ppl who don't own machines is upwards of 60%. Its not hard to see why. Banks work you quite hard anyways. I stare at a PC 8 hours a day. Plus there's the pager so you can respond to calls at night & so on...the association of PC=Work becomes quite hardwired. Last thing I'd want to do is muck around with a computer at home as well. If I buy a PC/Mac, like a desktop with monitor, where do I keep it ? I have to buy a computer desk and computer chair and all that? Dude I live in a tiny apartment 10 minutes from the bank. There's no space. As to keeping up with my skills - I've been doing this some dozen plus years at this point. I will say if you know how to fold and write a parser combinator, you are golden. I know both, so my comp science degree wasn't a total waste. Most of what I do is just some combination of map reduce filter fold partition, occasionally some lazy eval/Stream, some memoization, rest is just standard finance - portfolio theory, capm, derivatives, option pricing, stochastic calculus etc - you learn those at school anyways, otherwise they won't give you a diploma, and the bank won't hire you without a diploma.

Do you like what you do? Is the pay or reward worth it?

I'm confused as well by this. From my perspective, in order to keep your business and personal lives separate (and private) you need two separate systems to work on. I have no interest in IT possibly being able to log or monitor my interactions with my personal GMail, bank accounts, etc. Since most companies Acceptable Use Policies provides them with the right to monitor all of this and more, it seems necessary.

Other people though don't seem to feel as strongly about keeping their work and personal lives separate...

I find folders and mail accounts work fine for keeping work and personal stuff separate. Just having one computer to deal with is nice. And cheaper.

With Netflix, their value proposition is:

- Simplicity - it's very simple to select a movie on their website, and you can spare a walk to a DVD rental shop/supermarket. It's even easier to stream a movie.

- Price. $10/month is much cheaper than $15/DVD, if I watch several movies a month and don't plan to re-watch same movies very often

I don't see how that's applicable to the remove development - price argument doesn't work (it's actually cheaper to own an old Mac in the long run) and simplicity could work both ways - it's easier to start with remote development but having a local GUI development is probably easier.

Re: your decision to buy or not to buy a Mac - I just wanted to highlight that on the grand scheme of things - where you want to invest your time, which is your most valuable asset - decision to buy an old mac is an easy one to make.

An old Mac will still take you 6-12 months to price-match this service...and they're running on modern equipment, keeping it updated (hardware and software) for you, and giving you instant access from anywhere, even your iOS device. If you want to use current hardware, you'll have to save money even longer (18-24 months), and you'll have to spend time managing the system & tools configuration.

Sure this all may not be a big deal to most developers. "Most" isn't "all".

Buy an iPod Touch, start writing iOS software. You can be in the black on this within days.

Also, you can directly bill this as a cost to a project/client. It is (for some people) harder to justify charging a client for use of hardware you have on hand than for an external service you're using specifically for their job...

I suspect it might be a sneaky way to work around corporate IT department policies too "I'm not buying unsupported or non-preferred-vendor Apple hardware, I'm just using an external service, just like AWS or Akamai".

I just did some quick calculations and you can buy an used mac for the price you would pay for a year of this service. And your analogy is completely wrong, at least for me, I don't watch a movie much more than on time, unless it is already playing for one motive or other.

But you will use the same computer for a time.

So he has to wait a year to be able to buy the mac or he can start coding right now...

That is indeed right. But we just read this and in my office 6 people are already looking into it.

We are all Linux/Windows Devs. But we are interested in the iOS ecosystem. This service would allows to enter without many barriers. Also it would allows to interact and be part of team developing iOS.

I think idea rocks. We could at last port some of our apps to MonoTouch.(We are using MonoDroid already).

It certainly is a valid point. However, your assumption seems to be that the biggest barrier to entry would be hardware? If so, I disagree, with all due respect. I spent best parts of the summer learning iOS - it's not extremely hard, but it has many non-obvious corner cases that you'll need to spend some time to discover. So with almost any reasonable hourly rate (even at the minimal wage) I've invested much, much more in the learning of the framework that I would spend on a minimal hardware that will allow me to develop for iOS.

Let's face it - if you're serious about porting your apps to iOS, you would buy a mac at some point.

It is hardware and software, it is the Mac ecosystem; at least for me. My core business is the Web and we are getting into Android. I already spent several thousand dollars in Hardware. If I want to develop in Mac I need a Mac. It is not as easy as Linux. I could of course built my own Mac, but still it gets pretty expensive. Specially since iOS is not our core market.

Now, if iOS ends up being big for us, then yeah, we would stop using the service and buy our own machines. But then the service served its purpose.

I guess what I am trying to say is that this kind of service has a market and is not that small. But I do agree with you 100%. If you are serious about iOS development, you need to get your Mac.

BTW, when I said potential market is small, I didn't mean "number of people around me who will find the idea fascinating" is small :). For obvious reason, this is not the case here at HN, but we're a very special crowd.

Lol. I know what you meant. I just wanted to show you the impact in an office of 13. That is close to 50%.

And While I think the market is not big, I don't think it is that small either.

You are right on the numbers and logic for a specific scenario but you are overlooking the fact that there are hundreds of development teams who primarily work on non-Mac platforms and are getting on to iOS and most of these teams have one Mac that they use to test their iOS apps and they cannot afford to move all their teams to Macs (the cost of a desktop is 1/4th as compared to the Mac in India, for example). All such teams and small / mid sized companies would love this sort of a service and would be willing to pay for it. The pricing needs to be simplified IMO but the service is spot on, for certain market segments. And I believe these segments can make up a big market.

So your customer is a student, or anyone who sees iOS development as a moneymaking opportunity but does not have the money to jumpstart the activity. Fact is, there are some of us who just don't have the extra cash to jump in (having spent it on an iPad, now irritated we can't do development for an otherwise awesome platform). Sure we could buy an old Mac Mini for a couple hundred bucks (monitor, keyboard, etc aside), but for that price we could be online with this service for 10 months! we also get the chance, for just two digits, to try out iOS development without getting a POS used box for hundreds of dollars which will go unused if maybe iOS isn't our thing after all.

I'm literally selling blood to buy a MacBook Air just for iOS development. It's taking a while...yet for 2% of that cost I can start tonight. I teach beginning programming. I've hesitated suggesting an iOS class because the hardware isn't there and won't be considering both school and student wallet contents...but with this service, any PC or iP* becomes an iOS development tool.

Awesome that now the entry point for iOS is a $200 iPod, $99 annual deloper fee (when you've got something ready to sell), and ~$20/mo bootstrap fee. Nothing else needed.

> I'm literally selling blood to buy a MacBook Air just for iOS development

I admire your determination. Look, I've bought an iMac to learn IOS in my spare time. Why don't we trade - time on my iMac, and you answer my iOS questions? PM me.

:-) would like to, but as I don't have a Mac I haven't done enough iOS work to answer any questions yet. Sounds we're at about the same level now.

Email me anyway. My iMac is idle 20 hours a day. teyc@cognoware.com

If you are having to stretch that much to purchase a Mac, why go for the Air? Get a less expensive Macbook Pro ... or even just a Macbook. Buy used off of eBay, max out the RAM and you'd be in good shape.

Because my home computer is a 7-year-old Sony ultraportable featuring a Pentium M with 0.5GB. My upgrade pattern is: buy maxed-out top of the line, then grind it into the ground.

Well, that makes sense then! :)

This is a good devil's advocate summary, except feasibility of remote development with a GUI. I don't agree with a few of these points though.

"Someone who has either invested or going to invested 100's of hours to properly learn the iOS/Mac frameworks"

I think a lot of people will just want to experiment with something, or see some app, in my case I need to fix a bug in a desktop app I use. The kind of bug that I think just requires running a build and then searching forums, etc. for the error. I think the 100s of hours would have been wasted setting up virtualization and the toolchain but I can pay 20-50 a month to have that done for me.

"someone who is either unable to afford an older mac mini ($200-300 as noted in other comments) OR someone who has no cheap way to deliver older mac hardware to his home country."

A lot of people will want to try things out. There is a huge convenience value to just paying a monthly fee and logging in to a virtual system that is already setup versus the hassle of buying a mac mini, connecting it all up, setting up a virtualization, installing all the junk you need for development, etc. Not to mention the upfront cost of buying a mac mini will most likely be more than experimenting for 2-3 months. I'll need to update the software on it regularly, etc. And lastly, it is just another thing to take up space on my desk that I don't use that often that: collecting dust, taking up plug space, needing to not spill coffee on, etc.

The real question I have is developing in a GUI over remote access even feasible? How good does your inet connection really have to be? How much can be done via non-GUI ?

You're right - I missed the "feasibility of remote development with GUI" part.

Re: your other comments - sure, I totally see who the service will appeal to some customers. The market is certainly there.

What I'm concerned about is the market _size_: I still believe that any current/future iOS/Mac developers will buy a Mac eventually, and there may be not many people like who only need a Mac to fix an occasional bug in an open-source Mac app, which by itself requires a significant skill.

Not every company has to be huge or insanely profitable.

I'm working on a productivity software startup which is currently working on the flagship product. In the interests of starting small, I'm targeting the platforms I have easy access to: x86 Linux, AMD64 Linux, and Win32. My dev machine allows me to test x86 Linux and AMD64 Linux builds, and I have been building binaries for Win32 and doing basic testing under Wine, with plans to test on a real Windows system using AWS or similar.

A service like this would make it easier for me to support Mac OS X; to build for OS X, I would most likely try to set up a build VM on something like PureDarwin, and test on something a real Mac using a service like this.

That said, I don't think there is a good reason to hold back my release for Mac, so it would probably be worth waiting, and if sales go well on other platforms, I would probably be better off investing in Mac hardware.

You're forgetting multi-platform development. I'm creating an Android app (still unfinished) using appcelerator titanium, and was thinking about porting it to iOS later - it should be pretty easy. This kind of solution looks very interesting for me. Not a big market, but there is a market.

I maintain some tools (mostly open-source) and would like them to work on OS X as well. I run a mixture of Windows and Linux boxes and VMs, and there's no legit way (that I'm aware of) to run OS X inside a VM.

Wouldn't this service be good for me, allowing me to easily test my code on OS X?

A bit too expensive, though.

You're missing that $240/year isn't your only option. Let's say I'm writing a cross platform library/server/non-gui app. I'm developing it in Linux, and regularly testing it on FreeBSD and Windows, all of which I can boot into from my main computer. Being a able to pay a few bucks every release to make sure it compiles and runs on OS X as well would be well worth it, and depending on your release schedule would probably end up costing less $50/year.